In a diversified organization with many business units having a mix of cloud-based, home-grown and/or vendor solutions, application generation of workforce information is quite often an inefficient and non-standard process. Each business unit having its own solution can make it difficult to standardize an organization's workforce information and/or apply business rules to the workforce information in an efficient and timely manner. For example, there is typically redundancy of information, inconsistent data definitions, data inaccuracy, minimal data re-use, limited transparency into business rules and/or data sourced from non-authoritative sources.
Various methods exists to standardize workforce information across multiple business units. One such exemplary method involves applying one or more business rules to workforce information by having each business unit invoke the business rules via a web service. There are difficulties associated with this exemplary method. For example, it can be necessary that application servers for each of the business unit be operational at the same time that the business rules are to be applied to the workforce information. This can be undesirable because the workforce information is typically not mastered and/or scattered across the enterprise and/or various cloud systems. Other difficulties associated with the method include 1) the process of sending the workforce information via the web service, applying the rules on the web service server side, and transmitting the information back can cause unwanted latency; 2) transmitting un-encrypted workforce data between servers can create a security risk; and 3) poor performance by failing to meet service level agreements (e.g., execution of rules for large datasets can exceed 30 minutes for ˜38,850 employees with 77,780 business rules where a lesser amount of time is the agreement).
Another exemplary method involves storing the workforce information in an XML file and configuring one or more business rules into an executable jar file that executes on the XML file. Some of the difficulties with this method are as follows: 1) an entire XML file has to be generated prior to applying the rules, which can cause all other aspects of the method to have to wait until the file is generated prior to processing resulting in delay; 2) the XML file is not encrypted causing a potential security breach; and 3) scaling to a larger data set degrades performance. For example, as the number of records increases, the file size increases. For a serial approach, as the file size increases, because the resources are largely engaged in parsing the increased file size, unused resources are idling.
Another approach involves using Java and embedding the rules within Java to act as a bridge between a workforce information database and a rules engine. Some of the difficulties with this method include a failure to allow for a reset capability and a slow read and write.
Therefore, it is desirable to receive workforce information from multiple varied business units and apply one or more business rules to the workforce information with an efficient, secure, and uniform method.